So, the last update to Fusion was 9.0.2 back in July of last year...yet DaVinci Resolve 15 has been seeing 1-2 updates per month. Could you maybe show the same love to Fusion...especially for those who shelled out $300 for a Studio license and have seen zero stability improvements/new features in 7 months? Asking for a friend...

Best you can do is make your voices heard and hope that soon Grant Petty will turn around and say 'We have been listening to Fusion users so V10 is on the way!'. Otherwise if they do plan to shelve it (it would be nice if they could at least let us know) perhaps they can open the code to the user group who can give it some love. I wonder if the Blender foundation would be interested in creating its own stand alone Comp software? They are doing some incredible things with Blender ATM. Has anybody had a good look at Natron recently?

If they do kill Fusion standalone I cant see them releasing it to the community. Same as Autodesk with Softimage, They wanted to keep the tech for their other apps. And BM have done that by putting Fusion inside Resolve.

I heard that Natron didn't have a developer anymore. Not sure if its dead or just in limbo until someone else decides to work on it. I guess that is one down side of opensource.

If they axe the standalone version of Fusion that means serious compositors only have Nuke left which is a scary prospect for all. Fusion in Resolve has also introduced a lot of new users to Fusion stand alone who are using it for more complex stuff (and because Fusion in Resolve is really a bit crappy).

Well all you have to do is go to the front page and see if it mentions Fusion anywhere and that would be your answer. Mention of Davinci Resolve's Fusion after two screen scroll gives you the definite answer. So there is that.

Btw why does their homepage look like oldschool ad banner grid from ten years ago?

highbeamstudios wrote:I think we all live in hope, But how a company can see this silence as a good marketing strategy I will never know.

I am enjoying using fusion and Davinci but my opinion of Blackmagic has diminished.

They've been pretty vocal that Resolve is the future of Fusion. Not super explicit, but I'm not sure how anyone can come to a different conclusion.

Maybe they'll do one more "throw a bone" release, but my guess is they'll try to stuff as much of it into Resolve 16 as humanly possible, so that there are as few reasons as possible to choose Fusion stand-alone over the integrated version

highbeamstudios wrote:my guess is they'll try to stuff as much of it into Resolve 16 as humanly possible, so that there are as few reasons as possible to choose Fusion stand-alone over the integrated version

A lot of other stuff is fixable, but I really don't think those points can be addressed -- that's simply not how Resolve works.

I said it before they announced the integration in R15: "they're 2-3 years away from being ready for this." They surprised me, then un-surprised me by demonstrating that it really isn't usable yet. I'm fine with some in-production testing (the rest of Resolve hasn't suffered for the presence of the Fusion page), but it's become clear that there may be some fundamental design incompatibilities that can't be solved by any amount of time or effort.

If they kill standalone Fusion, The Foundry will have some returning customers. Sigh...

Jed Mitchell wrote:Actually I bet they could keep the render nodes working without much effort - pretty sure the engine itself works the same in the Resolve page as in standalone Fusion.

My impression is that they are rewiring the engine to large extents, to have GPU ops that Resolve side wants to see, and with it a whole different memory management etc. And due to this, I find it hard to imagine that Fu standalone as it is will continue as it was, paths between Fu in Resolve and current standalone diverged some time ago already. At best I'd hope for Fusion stripped from Resolve, which is like.. Fu in Resolve, without Resolve.

Jed Mitchell wrote:Right now Resolve is just a wrapper for Fusion 9, so our farm still works fine as long as it's not processing any Resolve-specific nodes.

How are you working that? Copying out to Fu9 and submitting from there? Or have you worked out a submission directly from Resolve? I have a couple of ideas, but there's been no time (and not much desire, tbh) to try them out.

Bryan Ray wrote:How are you working that? Copying out to Fu9 and submitting from there?

Yeah I just leave a generic Fusion comp open while I work in Resolve and copy / paste into it as needed. I set the render range to 1000 frames so anything shorter just drops when it's done and since the comp is already loaded in the Render Manager I can just clear the status and off it goes again.

It sounds dumb (is dumb?) but it works fine and only takes a second to execute.

I imagine there's a way to script this but like you implied, what's the point when we still don't know where this is all going, and honestly the Fusion page is so unreliable I only use it for very simple comps within Resolve. The Fusion page doesn't get around the simple fact that image sequences are the only reliable way to composite so most of the time it's faster to just set up a standalone comp and round-trip as usual.

highbeamstudios wrote:my guess is they'll try to stuff as much of it into Resolve 16 as humanly possible, so that there are as few reasons as possible to choose Fusion stand-alone over the integrated version

A lot of other stuff is fixable, but I really don't think those points can be addressed -- that's simply not how Resolve works.

I said it before they announced the integration in R15: "they're 2-3 years away from being ready for this." They surprised me, then un-surprised me by demonstrating that it really isn't usable yet. I'm fine with some in-production testing (the rest of Resolve hasn't suffered for the presence of the Fusion page), but it's become clear that there may be some fundamental design incompatibilities that can't be solved by any amount of time or effort.

If they kill standalone Fusion, The Foundry will have some returning customers. Sigh...

Honestly, 3/5th of that is... preference.

How clear is this stuff to you? You've seen the code? I'd wager you're wrong.

I'd also say that if your idea of proper integration is literally copy and pasting the fusion experience as you know it (now) into Resolve, then you need to get your expectations in order. Fusion is being integrated into Resolve, not the other way around.

I still think Resolve needs more UI flexibility. The current Final Cut Pro X quasi-ripoff, minus the charm, isn't very fun to work with (personal opinion).

How clear is this stuff to you? You've seen the code? I'd wager you're wrong.

I'd also say that if your idea of proper integration is literally copy and pasting the fusion experience as you know it (now) into Resolve, then you need to get your expectations in order. Fusion is being integrated into Resolve, not the other way around.

I am very excited about where Resolve+Fusion is headed -- I make sure to vocally thank BMD staff any time I interact with them for all the positive impact they've had on my work.

And no, I'm not on their development team - they seem quite alright without my help. But I think it's healthy to have public discussion about the tools we use. I haven't met many developers in this industry who aren't interested in hearing (polite feedback from their customers.

So, I think about it like this: Nuke and Fusion both arrived at some conventions and features that artists and studios seem to agree are important. There are plenty of other ways to do things but parts of the current "Nuke-like" compositing model don't mesh very well with Resolve as we know it.

I don't think taking features & choices ("preferences") away is always a bad thing -- I actually really like the rigid design of Resolve's UI -- but it will have an effect. I think a good integration of Fusion will be incredible to have in Resolve, and I'm very excited about it, but there will be tradeoffs if we lose Fusion standalone. Depending on what you do, those tradeoffs might not matter at all or they may be critical. I don't need a "copy - pasted" Fusion integration, but I do want some way of addressing the problems we're all pointing out that don't exclude current users.

You mentioned FCPX - Apple is great at removing choice from the user for the sake of streamlining what they think you need. But they've lost a lot of customers from this industry (and gained different ones) since the 90s because of those choices and the features they prioritized.

Is that bad? I don't know, Apple seems happy enough with where they're at. You've got to change stuff to move forward and BMD certainly doesn't seem afraid to change things. But if a contingent of their happiest customers are worried about product direction or want a specific feature, BMD probably doesn't mind knowing about it, whether they have a solution or not.

Since using Fusion from the 1st version ever created 20year back from now I must say I have mixed feelings about the "fusion" from fusion into resolve. Here are some thoughts:

1. Fusion was always about speed in comparison to nuke. Whenever something has to render quickly we would choose fusion standalone over nuke anytime. When fusion lives only in resolve this is a complete different story.2. Fusion is missing some few but essential features comparing to nuke. A better EXR multipart workflow for instance. Shuffeling out AOVs more easy etc. when BMD really wants to offer something competitive they have to refactor some of the essential nodes that needs an update for years.3. sparse Documentation on the API is still a pain in the a4. Incomplete or stuck development of the 3d part in fusion. 3d in fusion has great potential but would love to see a PBR ready shader implementation for instance.5. Support from BMD is okayisch, but they need a board where user can vote on features and the dev team should do exactly this.6. Resolve & Fusion should both change to a subscription license model imho so this is the only way they can continue putting effort in the software development instead of selling it by the piece.

Quality software needs to evolve on and on. Implement new, refactor old. Software is a living thing so to speak and you can kind of feel it. Badly patched sofware with dirty feature hacks in it is unsustainable over time and will eventually die. - This is the reason why new sofware packages with state of the art programming can run down the market in a very short period of time (e.g. Houdini, Modo, Blender) - Adapt or die

So if BMD reads my lines of crappy english - I love your products and .. but take your time to grow into the compositing market - Start talking to the fusion community the will work with you - so that fusion will evolve

Well, yes. They makes tons and tons of money off their iPhones and the people who love their Macs (and MacOS/ iOS) are so loyal they keep buying their stuff anyway, so yes, I'd be happy to if I were Apple.

TimElschner wrote:6. Resolve & Fusion should both change to a subscription license model

I'm gonna say a big "no" on that one. I much prefer a perpetual license, but I certainly wouldn't complain about needing to purchase updates or having a maintenance model. I just don't want a situation like Adobe or Autodesk, where if you stop paying for your subscription you completely lose access to the software.

Each time a new release of Resolve comes out, I try to do something within Fusion in it. So far, it just isn't stable enough for me (and I'm saying this after having Fusion crash about 10 times on me).

If Fusion in Resolve becomes fully usable, I think I'll be ok with it. What I'm not sure about is that I'm not sure my computer/GPU is good enough to run Resolve. It often works ok, but it bogs my computer down and things get quite sluggish. Standalone Fusion doesn't usually seem to do this.

I can justify paying $300 for what is basically a hobby for me. Nuke is way out of the ballpark, and I keep running into things I can't do with the non-commercial version of Nuke. Aside from a bunch of things that work more smoothly in Nuke (roto, tracking, etc), I actually like Fusion better. I hope that Fusion remains something that I can continue to use.

TimElschner wrote:6. Resolve & Fusion should both change to a subscription license model

I just don't want a situation like Adobe or Autodesk, where if you stop paying for your subscription you completely lose access to the software.

Well, it does not has to be the subscription model like in Autodesk or Adobe, I agree. But lets more think about something like a maintenance subscription like foundry does it. You buy the package once and with a 1 year maintenance fee. (Upgrade and updates within this time period) Afterwards you can renew the maintenance or use the last version till your payed period ended indefinitely. That´s a pretty reasonable license approach.Fact is, a company needs to plan years ahead to now how much money rolls in and how much they can invest in what field. BMD is traditionally a company that creates hardware and sell by the piece. This is pretty okay for hardware, but for software it is more then suboptimal. Because at this low price fusion and resolve are currently it is a by product to just sell their hardware. So its more like a marketing tool. Just look at the prices, they hardly make any money with it. Its like a giveaway for when you buy a camera. - So that beeing said, I would be more then happy to opt in into a transparent pay-per-use or maintenance model if this ensure me that bugs are solved and tools are refactored and the community is part of the development process. This would make fusion great again (sorry for the term).I totally agree on your autodesk & adobe license model opinion, this is a nightmare, they buy companies (like allegorithmic) and just drop it into their subscription package. Also Maya, Max, Adobe PS, PDF are not getting any better or more innovative since years. Adobe&Autodesk is just a big license company with a huge marketing budget and no real spirit for software anymore.

The middle ground is needed. Maintenance subscription YES but with very close contact to the user based. So this would be a win for everybody. The software companies can plan their development costs ahead and the users get what they need.

Jed Mitchell wrote:You mentioned FCPX - Apple is great at removing choice from the user for the sake of streamlining what they think you need. But they've lost a lot of customers from this industry (and gained different ones) since the 90s because of those choices and the features they prioritized.

Is that bad? I don't know, Apple seems happy enough with where they're at. You've got to change stuff to move forward and BMD certainly doesn't seem afraid to change things. But if a contingent of their happiest customers are worried about product direction or want a specific feature, BMD probably doesn't mind knowing about it, whether they have a solution or not.

So, why not talk it out? At least here somebody is listening.

I didn't mention FCPX in that sense. I only stated that the current Resolve UI is a quasi-FCPX rip-off, which it does feel like when working with it.

Apple had a different plan for FCPX, one that is more in line with Adobe's push into education and the consumer and prosumer markets, except with less emphasis on the Pro Market. It was a calculated risk, and it's paying off for them. It may not be in the upper echelon of Pro Use, but this is also a benefit in that they get to avoid the stagnation that being a major player in that market forces on product development.

The stuff you wrote regarding FCPX is really not relevant to what I actually said in my earlier post

I was just talking about how the application looked.

FCPX was missing a lot of functionality vis-à-vis FCP7 when it released. It wasn't just the Magnetic Timeline that turned Professionals off.

d3zd3z wrote:Each time a new release of Resolve comes out, I try to do something within Fusion in it. So far, it just isn't stable enough for me (and I'm saying this after having Fusion crash about 10 times on me).

If Fusion in Resolve becomes fully usable, I think I'll be ok with it. What I'm not sure about is that I'm not sure my computer/GPU is good enough to run Resolve. It often works ok, but it bogs my computer down and things get quite sluggish. Standalone Fusion doesn't usually seem to do this.

I can justify paying $300 for what is basically a hobby for me. Nuke is way out of the ballpark, and I keep running into things I can't do with the non-commercial version of Nuke. Aside from a bunch of things that work more smoothly in Nuke (roto, tracking, etc), I actually like Fusion better. I hope that Fusion remains something that I can continue to use.

TimElschner wrote:2. Fusion is missing some few but essential features comparing to nuke. A better EXR multipart workflow for instance. Shuffeling out AOVs more easy etc. when BMD really wants to offer something competitive they have to refactor some of the essential nodes that needs an update for years.

+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1And reworking the UI but especially the UX.

I would also like to see Resolve and Fusion separate. It's nice to have a Fusion tab in Resolve but seems to work only if you wanna put together something simple like a title sequence or so, but not complex production shots, very cumbersome. Imagine you wanna do postproduction on Transformers or so and you end up with a Resolve Project with 500+ vfx shots, ridiculous .But first and foremost I hope that Fusion will stay standalone for as long as possible because the current implementation (if you wanna call it that) is VERY buggy at least on Linux. So far I couldn't get anything useful out of it...in fact I already struggle to get anything in to it.

My first wish was BMD to improve the VFX connect thing, which appeared to me as a good choice regarding to the main differences between Resolve and Fusion (HW demands, UI, perf, ...). It also keep 2 standalones that can grow their specific ways...

Now I also ever tried ReFusion tab in every new Resolve version.

I don't try anymore, and my original wish is still the same...(even if I know it won't go this way)

Totally agree, VFX connect is what I tend to use if I am working in Resolve and need to comp. Its fast to setup and easy to use, just needs to be a bit better organised. I think BMD needs to sit down with some Compositors as it feels like they are missing a large part of the picture, I know some of the Fusion staff left/were let go a while back and I wonder if they have lost some of that skill set and perspective.

Fusion Connect, Avid Connect.. Whatever we're calling it these days. I actually beta tested this thing like 6yrs ago with Eyeon. It saved my behind on a show with 93 green screens in the first episode. No way Avid would've pulled good keys or handled the composites like fusion did.

So you can see, i love using connect. i consider it a part of my toolset and use it as often as possible. except now. with Avid 2018.12, it just doesn't work. setting the location for files doesn't work, opening in fusion doesn't work.. can this PLEASE be fixed soon? really. it's important!!

Marc Fisher wrote:Fusion Connect, Avid Connect.. Whatever we're calling it these days. I actually beta tested this thing like 6yrs ago with Eyeon. It saved my behind on a show with 93 green screens in the first episode. No way Avid would've pulled good keys or handled the composites like fusion did.

So you can see, i love using connect. i consider it a part of my toolset and use it as often as possible. except now. with Avid 2018.12, it just doesn't work. setting the location for files doesn't work, opening in fusion doesn't work.. can this PLEASE be fixed soon? really. it's important!!

Hi Marc - totally agree - it was the reason I purchased Fusion Studio 9 ($999) and then it was broken in Media Composer 2018.7.

Avid claims that they corrected a defect in their plugin architecture that BMD happened to be leveraging with Fusion Connect and hence Avid has placed the onus on BMD to fix this issue. BMD has remained silent on this issue much to the frustration of paying users (their support for Fusion has been nothing short of abysmal).

Please add your voice to this issue by opening a support ticket with BMD. Hopefully more voices will help.

It also appears that support is not even responding to any Fusion standalone issues, even on the forums I've noticed that unless its Fusion in Resolve there is no response. I don't get the point of all this silence from BM, even a simple 'we're not sure at the moment' is better than nothing. They do such great work ina lot of areas then undermne it by not communicating with its users/owners. Makes it difficult to trust the brand.

Yes, Fusion in Resolve is really unstable.Coming from Nuke and working on commercials, seeing the merge of the two software was quite appealing; simplifying the conform, color grade and online. But it is not ready to be implemented in production.VFX Connect works fine and Fusion 9 is much more compositor friendly (UI).I just hope VFX Connect had a customizable folder structure and multiple shot export.

I really hope they keep it alive..don't get me wrong I've got issues with it, but facing the alternatives in the sub 1k price range...

Hope they can streamline the code between the davinci and the standalone version so both can be substained. There is potential in a davinci version..,but currently I would rather work in standalone and bring the composited shots into resolve _after_ comp is finished....maybe its just a mindest thing.

TimElschner wrote:6. Resolve & Fusion should both change to a subscription license model

I'm gonna say a big "no" on that one. I much prefer a perpetual license, but I certainly wouldn't complain about needing to purchase updates or having a maintenance model. I just don't want a situation like Adobe or Autodesk, where if you stop paying for your subscription you completely lose access to the software.

On every other point, though, I'm in hearty agreement.

Agreed. I detest "Ransomware". I wouldn't mind a maintenance fee IF BMD could prove they plan on doing ANY maintenance. The integration with Resolve just feels like too much bloat. If I'm doing serious compositing I'll be doing it in the stand-alone version and 9.0.2 still isn't as stable as it could be.

I don't think anyone would complain about $300 to upgrade to the next major Studio version, even if its just to keep Studio alive and maintained. Agreed on the big No to 'Ransomware', hate that model with Adobe proving how they can't be trusted as they hike up prices.

Kel Philm wrote:I don't think anyone would complain about $300 to upgrade to the next major Studio version, even if its just to keep Studio alive and maintained. Agreed on the big No to 'Ransomware', hate that model with Adobe proving how they can't be trusted as they hike up prices.

haven't had an issue with Adobe each year I've had CC, in keeping my pricing around $30-40 a month. The reps don't mind helping out and there are deals all the time. The writing is on the wall regarding fusion. BMD doesn't care to respond to these queries about Fusion and are content with hacking it into Resolve as that's their main user base at this point for their software. "Ransomware", "Maintenance". it's all the same. You pay these days to keep your software updated and work a job or two to make those payments.